Is US Verging on Growing Demilitarization?

What is generally forgotten is that America's current global military leadership has been a reaction to endangering world events that have threatened this nation's unique economic growth and stability. It is supported by the "isolation" provided from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans' safety zones. This has been true since the nation's inception well over 230 years ago.

With the exception of a horrifying five-year-long Civil War, and America's role in achieving power balance in World War I, U.S. isolation from disconcerting troubles, such as colonialism and civil revolutions was more a matter of allowing multimillions of immigrants, mostly from Europe, to build an economic infrastructure that made the U.S. an incomparable superpower, based on millions of independent and corporate businesses, unmatched anywhere else in the world.

This superior success drive was funneled into military prowess by the World War II events, culminating into America's World War II entry, by the December 7 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While the Pacific victory resulted almost solely from America's force of arms, the U.S. also provided the "second front" and most of the military equipment crushing Nazi Germany's path to ultimate world domination.

Unlike the post World War I period of the isolationist "Roaring Twenties," the U.S. was faced with rebuilding Europe, and providing a balance to the expansionism ambitions of the Soviet Union, which was swiftly filling the vacuum of power left by Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia. This forced the U.S. to retain an expanded martial counterpoint to Russia's superpower status. The Soviet Union was fully equipped with a conventional nuclear and hydrogen bomb inventory that could have dominated much of the world that lay prostrate due to World War II destruction.

This led to the protection of South Korea, and the ultimate miscues of the Vietnam war. It also meant for the U.S. a peace time extension of mandatory military service (conscription) until its cancellation during the President Nixon's Administration. While NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was increasingly becoming a "paper tiger," the U.S. found itself pretty much going it alone in both Iraq invasions, as well as the temporary Taliban eradication in Afghanistan.

With the current Administration accelerating the detachment of militarily active U.S. foreign policy involvement from the world trouble spots, and severely cutting back both men, materiel, and high-cost technology from the current "professional armed forces," the slippage into a moderate isolationist military phase is heavily supported by the current executive U.S. power structure.

The forthcoming 2016 presidential election will go a long way toward determining whether America's future path leads toward a new isolationism, or retention of the world's undisputed singular superpower status, needing conventional military strength to back up this global position.

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